Is it cheaper to pay once or monthly for a trade site? The three-year sum

Two tradesmen buy a website on the same Monday. One pays £750 up front to a company that builds it and hands it over. The other pays nothing on day one and £50 every four weeks. For the first sixteen months the second man is ahead, and he knows it, because the difference is still in his account. Around month 17 they draw level, and after that the running totals separate for good.

Neither of them did anything wrong. They answered different questions: one asked what it costs this month, the other asked what it costs by the time the van needs replacing. Here is the arithmetic on both, on prices UK companies publish today, and then the thing that makes the crossover much less important than it looks.

The three-year sum, on prices published this month

Over 36 months the cheapest published one-off route costs about £1,095, a £49 a month rented plan costs £1,764, and a plan at £50 every four weeks kept running the whole time costs £1,950.

Notice the third line is the dearest of the three over 36 months. That is my own plan, and I have put it there deliberately, because a comparison that quietly leaves out the seller's own number is not worth reading. What that line does not show is the next section.

The transfer date matters more than the crossover month

Thirteen payments of £50 comes to £650 in the first twelve months, which is less than the cheapest one-off build in the UK market, and on my terms the site and the domain transfer to you at that point.

The whole pay-once argument rests on one thing: at the end you own something. If a plan hands the site and the domain over on a fixed date, the argument stops applying on that date. The £1,950 in the table above is what happens if you keep buying the service afterwards, which is a different purchase from the website itself.

So the comparison a British trade should actually run is £650 against £750, not £1,950 against £1,095. That is the version I would want to be shown, and it is the one nobody in this market puts in a table, because most rented plans have no transfer date at all.

The question to ask every provider, in writing, is simply: is there a date on which the site and the domain become mine? A straight yes with a date is a good sign. A long answer is an answer. What that handover involves on the day, if you ever do move, is set out in how to move your website to a new designer.

Where paying monthly genuinely wins

Paying monthly is the better decision when cash today matters more than cash in two years, and when you are testing something rather than committing to it.

If you started the business this year and every outgoing is counted, £750 in one lump is a real obstacle. £50 every four weeks is not. Take the monthly route. The crossover is well over a year out and a business that does not reach month 17 does not care what happens at month 17.

The second case is testing. A new service line, a second town, a trade you are moving into. Renting the website for a year to find out whether the work is there is exactly the right order to do things in. Build or buy the asset once you know the answer, not before. I have talked two people out of committing on that basis and would again.

The assumption the sums quietly depend on

A one-off build price cannot be changed after you have paid it, while a rolling monthly fee can be repriced with notice, which makes every three-year monthly total an estimate rather than a figure.

Every subscription in Britain has gone up in the last three years. Streaming, insurance, broadband, the lot. There is no particular reason website plans are exempt, and a rolling contract is designed to allow it. So £1,764 is the optimistic version of the rented number, not the pessimistic one.

There is a second assumption underneath it, and it is the one that catches people out on a headline price. Tada publishes its prices excluding VAT and says so plainly, being deliberately not VAT registered. That is honest, and it is also a twenty per cent difference against a VAT-inclusive quote from somebody else. Ask every provider whether the number they have given you includes it.

What the arithmetic looks like from the seller's side

A monthly plan is worth more to the provider than a one-off build, which is why so many UK companies have moved to it, and that is a reason to read it carefully rather than a reason to avoid it.

Worth saying out loud, since I sell one of these models. A customer on £49 a month is worth £1,764 over three years and keeps paying after that. A customer who pays £750 once is worth £750 plus whatever the hosting brings. If you were designing a business to maximise revenue per customer, you would build the monthly one, and most of this market has. Only two of the nine UK providers I priced up publish a one-off option at all.

That does not make it a con. Predictable revenue lets a provider keep supporting a site properly instead of chasing the next build, which is genuinely better for the customer than a one-off fee and silence afterwards. But it explains why the monthly model is pitched harder, and why the ownership question tends to be the last thing mentioned rather than the first. The full nine-provider comparison is in monthly website plans for tradesmen.

What the money is actually buying in each case

A rented fee buys access to a website, a one-off fee buys the website itself, and a plan with a transfer date buys the second one on the first one's payment terms.

This is the part the arithmetic misses. At month 36 the rented customer has paid £1,764 and owns nothing in particular. The one-off customer has paid about £1,095 and owns a site, a domain and a set of files that work anywhere. If both stop paying tomorrow, one has a website and one has a redirect.

Some providers close that gap by handing over the files after a minimum term, which is a reasonable arrangement fairly described. Others do not say. Either way the question belongs in the comparison, and it belongs there before you have paid anything rather than at the point you want to leave.

The number that makes all of this small

The gap between the cheapest and dearest route over three years is about £855, which is roughly £24 a month, and less than most UK trades earn from a single decent job.

Worth keeping perspective. If choosing the wrong payment model costs you £24 a month, and choosing a website that does not bring in work costs you a job a quarter, you have been optimising the wrong variable the entire time. The cheap end of the market is where that goes wrong most often, and what actually gets cut down there is itemised in is a £99 trade website ever worth buying.

The one genuinely expensive outcome is neither model. It is the site nobody is maintaining, which costs the same every month and returns nothing, and it is far more common than people think.

See it before you decide either way

I build the mockup first. Free, of your actual business, before any money changes hands, so the decision is about something real rather than a price list. If you want it, there is no build fee and nothing to pay on day one, then £50 every four weeks covering the site, hosting, the domain, SSL, backups, security and unlimited small text and photo edits. Three months minimum and then rolling, your first payment back if you do not like the finished site, and after twelve months the website and the domain are yours to keep with no exit fee. Live in about a week. See what a tradesman website costs or apply at sitework.uk/#apply.